Research & Discovery

This page highlights the astonishing amount of scientific discovery happening at Columbia, one of the world’s leading research universities. 

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Clockwise from top left: An iceberg stranded on a submerged rock in northwest Greenland (Karl Zinglersen); homo erectus crania from the Turkana Rift (John Rowan); a mosquito feeding (Alex Wild); a shell of thick gas and dust (red) expelled from the outer layers of a star as its core collapses into a black hole. The inner regions show a heated ball of gas (white) continuing to fall into the central black hole. (Keith Miller, Caltech/IPAC - SELab)
Columbia University Discoveries in 2025-26 to Know About

Here are some of the top scientific research findings of the past academic year.


 

RECENT STORIES

A new tool developed at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health that measures how fast someone is aging could help epidemiologists understand the factors driving accelerated aging in vulnerable populations.

The Knight First Amendment Institute proposes legal protection for certain research and news-gathering projects focused on social media platforms.

Astronomer David Kipping and his Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia find an exomoon signal in archival data, hinting at the possibility of more exomoon discoveries to come.

Abraham Liddell, a postdoc at Columbia’s Data Science Institute, is developing data science tools to uncover personal and community narratives among free and enslaved Africans in the early modern Atlantic economy.

U.S. pharmacists are well-trusted by patients and projected to play an increasingly integral role in health care, says a new study by Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and ExpressScripts.

Columbia News spoke with three engineering experts about how to ensure that projects finish on time and on budget. 

Researchers affiliated with Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health have written a book that incorporates real-life stories of girls living across America about the first time they got their periods.

Women have a harder time staying off cigarettes on that first day than men in 12 low and middle-income countries, where about 60 percent of the world’s smokers live, says new Columbia Mailman School of Public Health research.

Bentley Shuster, a postdoc, spoke about life in the lab and her attempts to program soil-dwelling bacteria to shrink tumors in mice.

In a new study, researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Hong Kong University find that the omicron variant of Covid-19 is resistant to current vaccines and antibody treatments, and that even booster shots may provide limited defense against infection.

The group will send bacteria to the International Space Station to understand how low gravity affects microbes and antibiotics.

It was long accepted that the Vikings were the first people to settle the Faroe Islands, around 850 A.D. until traces of earlier occupation were announced in 2013. But not everyone was convinced. New probes of lake sediments clinch the case that others were there first.